Friday, May 07, 2010

Ever wondered what databases power the likes of facebook.com, digg.com, and amazon.com? Do you want to know more about alternatives to relational databases like Oracle and MySQL? Are you skeptical of the noSQL movement? Do you want to know if document-oriented databases perform as well as RDBMS?

Then my presenation on non-relational databases this Saturday 8th May 2010 is for you. Details are published on linuxbahrain.com

Monday, August 18, 2008

While we bust our heads day and night studying hard to get a degree, 12 Bahrainis, according to Arabian Business, paid money to get certificates in the mail. It is so despicable that I had an immediate urge to publish the names in BOLD. The disclaimer on the American magazine that published the list made me retreat.

Coincidently, University of Strathclyde, where I'm doing my MBA, sent us an email invitation for a very important meeting this weekend to address a similar issue. It seems that some of their students have been buying custom written assignments from individuals in Bahrain who make a business out of preparing bespoke MBA assignments. No wonder we have all kinds of morons in executive jobs all over the country.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

The moment you leave a comment on a blog post, you are actually engaging in a multi-way conversation. That conversation spans days with different people from different time zones having different views. The blog needs to be revisited again and again to keep up with the flow of ideas. So how do you keep track of these conversations? Some blog engines like blogger.com and some wordpress implementations give you the option to be notified by email of any changes happen after you leave a comment. This is a nifty trick but it is not used by all blog engines.

The solution I use is called Commentful from Blog Flux. It is a web service that keeps track of changes and updates on any blog post you ask it to monitor. You add a blog post to a watch list, and the system visits it every ten minutes to check if new comments are added. If a blog post is not updated for a month or so, it gets moved to an archive page so only the active ones are shown.